Overview
I attached the powerpoint of the lecture below that needs to be addressed. I also gave an example of a response and included the instructions below too.
Instructions: Please write a blog for each class that incorporates the readings, films and lectures into your answer. They should be approximately 500 words
For your blog postings I will be looking for three things: 1. Incorporation of course materials (readings, films, lectures) 2. How well/completely you answered the blog prompt 3. Overall quality of writing. Please think about these elements when writing your blogs.
Example: "The science of sociology" represents human behavior and how we look at and study the idea of society. In order to understand what this is you have to dive deep and try to grasp individuals and people that are in groups, converse or interact with one another. You also have to look at what sort of structure is shaping that individual or groups social life. there are various ways to study the human world and various types of research such as quantitative and qualitative research, observations, historical data, surveys, and other experiments.
The research process in terms of sociology, have various steps in order to achieve final solidified research. First, you have to dissect the question or the problem that you were looking at and understand what it really is, then once you have figured that out, you have to conduct a thorough review in order to form a question that your experiment will surround such as a hypothesis. once you have a hypothesis and you can design your study and collect all the data necessary to analyze it. After the data collection, you then draw conclusions to formulate your theory. It’s easier to be objective and sociologists are objective, but they also understand that there could be various biases that exist in their research.
One example that is a good mention in this case is Emily Durkheim and the famous study that was done on suicide. Using stats in order to study the rate of suicide across various context she dissected the role that influence takes on suicide. Through this research process, there was lots of data collected from a variety of sources, then what needed to be done was an identification and analyzing of several different types of patterns that led suicide in order to develop a solid theory that the studies purpose.
Another example, Erving Goffman, who conducted ethnographic work that represented ideas of every day life. There was an observational study done by him that used surveys to gather data on different people and how much social media was used and how using so much social media can affect such mental health. Using the surveys and in-depth interviews to gain more qualitative insights it showed the variety of results experiences or ways of thinking by teenagers. I feel that using the approach it allows for a more complex and easier understanding of how social media and mental health are tied together.
I feel that studying social media and how it affects mental health among teenagers is such a good topic to study and I would definitely choose that for my topic choice. I feel that using surveys done by several different teenagers, having in person interviews, and hearing what they have to say, in order to get quantitative and qualitative data would allow me to have a concise and solid case to present because it is a mixed-method approach and leads to a better quality study as well.
Ethical issues that I feel are necessary to mention are confidentiality, any potential or possible harm that can occur to participants throughout conducted research, and informed consent. Several larger scale studies that were researched in the past violated core ethical aspects and principles by manipulating the participants and also withholding their treatment. I feel that today ethical guidelines have become more strict, and requiring inform consent and confidentiality lead to little to zero harm and it is better for everybody in the long run. I feel it is very ideal and wise to have these guidelines and for them to be enforced by institutional review boards (IRBs) helps everyone to remain protected.